Comcast-Funded Website Plugs Comcast-Owned TV Show Promoting Comcast-Backed Trade Pact

News “explainer” Vox (6/10/16) ran a seemingly innocuous write-up on Friday of President Barack Obama appearing on NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon the night before, “slow jamming” the benefits of the highly controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership: “Watch: President Obama Sings Rihanna With Jimmy Fallon to Explain the Importance of the TPP.”

It would be funny if it weren’t a borderline parody of everything wrong with corporate-owned “new media”: What we have here is a Comcast-funded website plugging a Comcast–owned TV show to promote a trade deal aggressively lobbied for by Comcast.

NBC and the Tonight Show are owned by NBCUniversal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast. Comcast is also a major owner of Vox, having poured more than $200 million into its parent company, Vox Media.

“Obama Slow Jams the News” is an occasional bit on the Tonight Show where Obama pushes his policy goals to Fallon’s young audience and everyone gets a viral laugh. The text of Tara Golshan’s Vox write-up reads like a White House political ad:

Barack Obama with Jimmy Fallon (6/9/16): “Look, Jimmy, the TPP allows American businesses to sell their products both at home and abroad.”

It’s no secret that Donald Trump wants to do away with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and implement his own trade rules abroad (many of which, economists say, will lead the United States into a recession and put Americans out of work). The TPP is a “disaster,” he said Tuesday night, “almost as bad as NAFTA….”

On Thursday night, President Barack Obama had a response, in the form of a smooth slow jam, in an appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Here Goldshan frames the TPP as a right vs. left issue, with nutty far-right Trump on the anti-TPP side and calm, reasonable liberal Obama representing the pro position. The problem is a  substantial number of congressional Democrats oppose the TPP—including the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and (at least nominally) Hillary Clinton—along with a host of progressive environmental, labor, consumer,  healthcare and family farm activists. As we’ve noted before, this sort of “Trumpwashing” allows left-populist causes to be dismissed by lumping them into Trump’s brand of zany racist incoherence.

The promotion of the TPP is a recurring staple at Vox, which frequently publishes articles that happened to dovetail with the interests of their major investor, Comcast—a corporation that spends large sums trying to convince members of Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership:

• Why One Top Economist Thinks Obama’s Trade Deal Is Worth Passing (5/14/15)
• Bernie Sanders Has Picked a Terrible Argument Against the TPP (5/14/15)
• Whatever You Think of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama Should Get His Fast-Track Authority (5/23/15)
• Labor’s Fury Is Clouding Its Judgment (6/9/15)
• Hillary Clinton’s Flip-Flop on the TPP Makes No Sense (10/7/15)
• Why Clinton’s TPP Opposition Unnerves Me (10/8/15)
• Democratic Primary Voters Say They Support Expanding Trade Agreements (10/8/15)
• What Bernie Sanders Gets Wrong About Obama’s Trade Deal (11/6/15)
• Why Obama Says TPP Is Historic for Workers — and Why US Labor Unions Hate It (11/12/15)
• If You’re Poor in Another Country, This Is the Scariest Thing Bernie Sanders Has Said [about Sanders’ opposition to trade pacts] (3/1/16)

Even articles with vaguely negative framings like “The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Great for Elites. Is It Good for Anyone Else?” (4/17/15) and “Why Drug Companies and Hollywood Love the TPP” (11/6/15) still end up endorsing the thrust of the “trade deal” in the text of the article. One article “How Trade Deals Like TPP Fail the Global Poor” (11/6/15), attacked TPP from the right, effectively arguing that TPP’s problem is that it’s too limited, and doesn’t include more countries in scope. (One Q & A, however, with the head of the AFL-CIO—4/20/15—did offer a rare populist critique of the deal.)

Vox’s TPP “card stack” explainer feigns objectivity while generally touting the supposed upsides of TPP with little criticism. It even asks the loaded question, “The TPP would lower some trade barriers. How big would the economic benefits be?” The question is not will there be economic benefits to the TPP, but how awesome will they end up being? For this, Vox turned to one of its frequent neoliberal think tanks, the Peterson Institute, which is funded by a laundry list of transnational corporations also lobbying for the TPP. (The president of Peterson is the “top economist” cited earlier as wanting to pass TPP.)

In 2012, Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden claimed that Comcast knew more about what was in the TPP than he did. A 2015 report put Comcast’s official lobbying expenses at $4.6 million, including money spent strengthening copyright protections codified in the TPP. According to Public Report, Comcast had at least ten lobbyists focused on TPP in the 2013 legislative year. Top executives of Comcast have also been major funders of TPP’s most reliable and visible booster, President Obama.

This, of course, isn’t a grand conspiracy—it’s a matter of aligned interests. Comcast isn’t going to dump $200 million into a media outlet that is going to actively undermine its business interests. It’s far more likely—and, frankly, logical—to back those already in step with its “free trade” ideology.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.

You can contact Vox here (or via Twitter: @VoxDotCom). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.